Archive for November 2015

Farmers are concerned that the reintroduced predator will kill livestock, but research from other countries shows these fears are unfounded

The Eurasian lynx: research from other European countries shows their reintroduction is unlikely to trouble British farmers. Photograph: Alamy

Photograph: Jamen Percy/Alamy

Depending on who you ask, the Eurasian lynx is either a benign woodland wonder or a sheep-stalking terror. In reality, any lynx can be either or none of these things. But research from other European countries to which they have returned tells us that a mooted reintroduction to Britain is unlikely to trouble farmers.

The campaign to restore the 30kg cat to the UK gathered steam this week as the proposal was opened to stakeholder consultation. There is no suggestion the lynx will attack humans, but the National Farmers Union (NFU) was quick to release a statement laying out its objections.

The UK’s major farming lobby group said its biggest concern was that lynx would hunt farm animals – particularly lambs. “Those animals are farmers’ livelihoods,” said NFU countryside adviser Claire Robinson.

According to the Lynx UK Trust, the group behind the reintroduction push, farmers’ fears are baseless. An analysis from consulting firm AECOM, found that a lynx will take an average of just one sheep every two and a half years. It even raised the possibility of a net benefit to flock safety if the lynx controlled lamb-hunting foxes as they have in Switzerland.

“I would class 0.4 sheep per year as no impact,” said Paul O’Donoghue, the lynx trust’s chief scientific adviser.

The AECOM analysis averaged out statistics collected during the 1990s from across Europe. However in the original study no standardisation was used to ensure that sheep kills in each country had been recorded in the same way. One of the authors of the 15-year-old report, professor Thomas Kaphegyi, told the Guardian he was “surprised” to see their data used in this way. “Far more relevant information and data on depredation of lynx on livestock is at hand by now,” he said.

The average kills per lynx is important as it allows lynx advocates to estimate the total amount of compensation to be paid to farmers who lose sheep to lynx. The AECOM report found their initially proposed 38 animals would cost just £757 each year, paying farmers double the market rate for killed sheep. This cost would be overwhelmingly offset by £2.7m per year earned through a local lynx tourism boom and the reduction in deer management costs as lynx culled them naturally.

If this windfall proves remotely accurate, the project could remain economically feasible even if the sheep kill rate was 25 times higher – on par with Europe’s most lynx-troubled sheep flock in Norway. However there is little reason to think lynx will hunt this many sheep in Britain. Their flawed attempt to pin down a pan-European average masks the best argument the pro-lynx group has to convince British farmers their flocks are safe – everywhere is not the same.

The AECOM report doesn’t entirely ignore this variability. A “worst-case scenario” is discussed in which the UK’s sheep are hit at the same rate as in France (2.84 sheep per lynx per year) and the relatively huge impact of lynx in Norway is excluded as an outlier.

In September, Norway’s farming lobby warned Scottish farmers about the problem they were having with lynx. During the past century, when few lynx were found in the country, farmers grew accustomed to letting their sheep roam deep into the forest. This practice was exposed after lynx gained legal protection in 1979 and recolonised the forests.

According to a monitoring programme in Norway, between 259 and 486 lynx are responsible for killing 6,000-10,000 sheep each year. In some regions, individual male lynx have been known to take up to seven sheep each month.

But John Odden, the researcher who conducted the Norwegian study, said Norway was the exception that proved the otherwise more reassuring rule. In France’s Jura mountains, even though the amount of available deer prey is low, lynx took five times less sheep than in Norway because they were farmed in enclosed pastures. Odden’s work in Norway backed up the conclusions of researchers in France: that if sheep are kept in pastures slightly removed from woodland margins, regularly monitored and with high populations of deer, lynx mostly don’t bother with them.

“I would expect that depredation on sheep from lynx would occur on a regular basis in Britain,” he said. “But probably on a totally different scale to what we see here in Norway. You have much higher densities of wild ungulates [deer] than us, a more ‘clumped’ sheep distribution, and more forested areas without free-ranging sheep.”

The UK lynx programme has proposed releasing lynx into two English forests: Kielder in Northumberland and Thetford on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. The NFU said these forestry commission sites contained remote regions of patchy, fragmented forest beside which some graziers run sheep. It raised the possibility that these flocks would suffer.

We might pause to wonder at the impossibility – across the breadth of the British Isles – of finding a forest in which to release a few lynx without troubling sheep or shepherd. Six thousand years ago, Britain’s great forests covered 75% of the landscape. Seven thousand lynx ambushed their prey in those woods. Today, less than 13% of the country remains covered.

How rewilded is a lynx that is returned to a semi-wild, sheep-encroached forest?According to the Woodland Trust, sheep and deer are the primary reasons Britain’s forest cover remains at just one-third of the EU average. If the lynx reintroduction is to be anything more than a novelty, sheep-grazing in forest margins must be curtailed, forests must be allowed to spread, creating habitat corridors from which lynx have no need to venture. In this way, sheep and lynx can be kept safe from each other.

The Endangered Species Act was written into law in 1973. Since then it has successfully protected 99% of the species that fall into the “endangered” and “threatened” categories of the law. For this article in particular we will be focusing on the different species of wolves that are protected by this law.

Prior to the wolf being added to the Endangered Species list they were hunted to near extinction in North America and Mexico. Currently in America there are around 9,000 wolves populating the country, thanks in great part to the protections afforded them against hunters and poachers. However there is a current push on the State and National levels to reverse or otherwise dismantle the law protecting not only wolves but 2,179 other species of animals that face possible extinction within North America due to human activity.

With a heavy heart and incredible disappointment, I chose this image to share with you today. The image contains a quote from one of the scientists betraying our wolves by urging the western Great Lakes population of gray wolves be removed from protections of the Endangered Species Act.
26 scientists, including Dave Mech of the University of Minnesota and Adrian Wydeven of the Timber Wolf Alliance, argue the species has successfully recovered in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin and should be delisted.
“It is in the best interests of gray wolf conservation and for the integrity of the Endangered Species Act for wolves to be delisted in the western Great Lakes states where biological recovery has occurred and where adequate regulatory mechanisms are in place to manage the species,” wrote the scientists in a letter delivered Wednesday to Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Department of Interior, and Dan Ashe, director of…

Grand Rapids, Mich. – Michigan’s 2015 bear hunting season ended in October with fewer incidents than last year of hunting dogs being attacked by wolves. Only three attacks were reported to the state, down from 17 in the 2014 season, state wildlife officials said.

“It’s tough to speculate about why,” said Kevin Swanson, wolf and bear specialist for the Michigan DNR. “Livestock depredation reports are down too. We had 23 of those last year and only 11 so far this year. It’s possible that wolf numbers have declined, but we don’t know that and plan to do a wolf survey this winter.”

Michigan’s wolf population was last tallied in 2014. The DNR survey showed a minimum of 636 wolves in the Upper Peninsula. There were approximately 125 wolf packs…

Wild wolf howling in the Canadian Rockies Copyright : John E Marriott
Point counter point:

The newest debate on the fate of America’s wolves comes in the form of a letter…”The 18 November (2015) letter, sent to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), is intended to support the federal government’s position that wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan are fully recovered and that states should now manage the species.”Science Insider

The letter from 26 scientists states that wolves have recovered enough in the Great Lakes region and do not need protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Recovery of wolves has made great strides over the last 4 decades in the region with a population of over 3,700 wolves.

That is until 2011 when wolves were officially delisted in the Great Lakes and states like Wisconsin rushed to enact emergncy…